Worst Books of 2009! Nonfiction!

Worst Nonfiction of 2009:



10. The American Civil War by John Keegan - I admit, I wasn't the first person on the scene of this particularly horrible highway accident. I was still waiting for my copy of Keegan's book (enthused, as who wouldn't be, because the man has written some of the best works of military history in the last century) when the first rumors of its, er, shortcomings began to reach my ears. I picked up a copy of the book from a bookstore display table one day and handed it to a friend who's a Civil War scholar, saying "I haven't read this yet, but I'm hearing that it's got some problems - what do you think?" He took it, flipped to the three-page account of one battle he knows really well, and took a couple of minutes to read it. And then he looked up, aghast. And then I read the epic plank-by-plank destruction the book received in the New York Times. And finally I read it myself. And was aghast. Long lists of facts wrong - days, dates, casualty lists, physical locations, names - and worse by far than that (although the sheer extent of that made it inexcusable), horrible misunderstandings of the war and its meanings, sophomoric misunderstandings, on virtually every page. So Keegan has another accolade: he's written the single worst book on the American Civil War by a major historian. Now all I want to know is how the thing got into print.


9. Imperial Cruise by James Bradley - I guess I always knew a travesty like this was brewing with Bradley. The hugely overpraised Flags of Our Fathers was a curio draped in just enough autobiography to make it both unassailable and unimportant, and Flyboys, inestimably helped by the heroism of its subject, made for good-enough reading. I guess I always worried that the acclaim Bradley received from both those books might go to his head and make him forget that he's not actually a historian, just a professional sentimentalist. And in Imperial Cruise, hoo-boy, does he forget. This hyperventilating account of how "Teddy" (on every goddam page) Roosevelt and "Big Bill" (on every goddam page) Taft did all sorts of illegal things in order to placate ruthless Japan is aggravating junk from the very first page, a clanking, ugly collection of snide remarks, scandalous insults to the memory of two very good men, and gross misreadings of the primary sources, all of it absolutely smothered in just the kind of distorting hindsight trained historians are careful to eliminate from their work. Two pieces of urgent advice: first, don't read this book, and second, if you do read it, don't believe a single word of it.



8. The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose - Even if I hadn't known that Roose was a disciple of the manipulative moron A. J. Jacobs (he of The Year of Living Biblically), I'd have guessed it by the time I got to the end of this moronic, manipulative book about how Roose took a semester off from Brown and spent it at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, studying the Evangelical Christian students there in order to, as Roose continuously lies, learn more about them. What follows is like getting a eunuch to write a bedroom expose - the author does a lot of unconvincing poking around, but he completely misses the point. This is the Jacobsian formula: either take a complex subject and dumb it down until it can be read on a business flight from New York to L.A., or take a simple subject and try your gelded best to make it seem complex. Liberty University is a simple subject: it's a gigantic enclave of sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, evolution-denying reactionary Klansmen-in-training. Roose would shake his head at the persistence of such 'stereotypes'; I shake my head at brainless authors who'll play any kind of dumb in order to get a book contract.


7. Superfreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner - I didn't think it was possible for any book to irritate me even more than Freakonomics did, but the authors here proved me wrong - they took their first book, which was already shriekingly dumb, and made it even dumber. Here's page after page filled with faulty logic, unsubstantiated claims, and exactly the kind of pothead anti-logic that manages to be both pointless and dangerous. Pointless because merely reading something so easily disproven is a waste of time, and dangerous because most of the millions of people reading these pieces of crap apparently aren't bothering to disprove any of it. There's a wide stratum of young male readers out there who apparently want the world around them to appear as strange and inexplicable as the darkest Medieval cosmology. Bad enough that such a stratum should exist at all - much worse that carnie barkers like Levitt and Dubner should be so eager to feed it.


6. Byron in Love by Edna O'Brien - The first sign of trouble here came from lining up the book's title with the book's length: Lord Byron was one of the most complex young men who ever left us a mountain of letters and poems, and he strained, fought, and fled from the idea of love for his entire life, quite possibly without ever having once encountered the real thing with another human being (that he encountered it at least a few times with dogs is evident from his poetry, at least to anybody who's also encountered it) - and yet O'Brien's book is barely 180 pages long. There are authors who could cover the subject in such short terrain - Lytton Stratchey could, or Jessica Mitford - but O'Brien sure as Hell isn't one of them. Instead, what she covers - thinly, badly, is a quick tear-sheet of Byronic cliches without a single legitimate insight to recommend this book over the 8,000 better volumes on the subject. If Byron ever was really in love, you'll find not a hint of it here.


5. The Wauchula Woods Accord by Charles Siebert - The premise here - a writer visits a home for retired show business chimps and examines his reactions to them - is so good that the execution is all the more galling. Siebert has done work in the past I've enjoyed, but in this book - this potentially vital, potentially important book (that it has pretension to the latter is evident even from its title) - every trick of his trade just grates. It's never a good sign when you're reading a book wishing the whole time that the author would just shut up and tell the story - but after a couple of chapters of Seibert's nasal, dated wisecracking, you'll not only be wishing that, you'll be wishing it out loud, angrily. When I finished this book, I was filled with the angry sadness that can only come from watching an important subject treated in a shallow, annoying way. Which brings us to!


4. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer - Foer has always been inordinately impressed with his own writing talents; it was that morosely serious cockiness that gave Everything Is Illuminated whatever slender charms it possesses. And for all we know, Foer will ill-advisedly mine that thin vein for the rest of his career - except for this book, a disastrous detour into nonfiction, in which Foer writes like he was the very first person to a) father a child, b) craft a sentence, c) eat a hamburger, or d) research human cruelty to animals. This has two inevitable results: first, it offers a fairly palpable insult to anybody who's ever done a, b, c, or d. And second, it makes for a pretty damn tedious book. It's like listening to an overly-earnest ten-year-old tell you that the sun is actually composed of superheated gas: you're glad the kid's learned something he didn't know, but after about five minutes, you're hoping his parents will take him into another room.



3. The Book of Genesis illustrated by R. Crumb - I'd say something like "it's hard to tell which is worse, Crumb's stilted, pretentious introduction or the pages and pages of drawings that follow," but that wouldn't be completely true. The pages and pages of drawings are much, much worse. In his introduction, Crumb trumpets his "research" into the history and visual iconography of early nomadic tribes - but then he spends hundreds of panels drawing caricatures, anachronisms, and the gigantic, vaguely humanoid monsters he always substitutes for women. He likewise trumpets his fidelity to the text of Genesis - then spends the whole book visually undermining that text whenever he gets the chance. In the end, it's a good thing God doesn't read graphic novels (sorry, Kevin); if He did, He'd be even more pissed off than usual.




2. Signature in the Cell by Stephen Meyer - The closest this deeply, almost sinfully mendacious book comes to a thesis can be summed up like this: DNA, the 'assembly instructions' of living cells, is not the ultimate denial of the existence of God but rather the ultimate assurance of His existence. Using truckloads of fuzzy anecdotes and quasi-science, Meyer does his best to fog over the fact that DNA's journey from chemical process to biochemical process is fairly well documented and will only get more documented as scientific advances continue. When the last of DNA's mysteries are cracked - in ten, maybe five years - Meyer or somebody like him (probably a Liberty grad) will have to write a book exalting another Golden Calf of unobtainability ... and until then, we've got this cowardly little bit of Inquisition advocacy.


1. Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin, The Tyranny of Email by John Freeman - It's natural to lump these two together, since they're basically the exact same shrill screed, offered by the same blue-haired old biddy-bean who's just got too many dang people jabbering at her all the time. Both Helprin and Freeman deplore the effects the Internet and Internet-related technologies are having on the Western mind. People don't concentrate anymore (say the authors of these two fairly lightweight books); people don't research anymore (say the authors of these two obviously Wiki-friendly factoid assemblies); people have lost the simple joy of curling up with a good book (say the authors, even though Helprin hasn't done that in thirty years and Freeman has never done it in even once in his entire life, not even while laid up with a sprained ankle) - and while they're both doing all this hand-waving, the Internet they profess to despise is virtually teeming with a greater variety of good writing - by a greater variety of good writers - than any other forum in the history of the species. That juxtaposition begs us to simply ignore books like these - easy enough in Freeman's case, far harder, far sadder, in the case of the author of Winter's Tale.

OK! Everybody get some water, marshal your outrages, and gird your loins! The Best is yet to come!

Worst Books of 2009! Fiction!

2009 is finally winding down, and the End of Days clamor regarding the death of paper-and-ink books has never been louder. The Amazon Kindle is (if you believe their publicity statements) selling more than any other physical item in the history of the human race, and smack-dab in the entrance way of every single Barnes & Noble is a sleek kiosk staffed with book-averse clerks hawking B&N's own electronic reader, Nook. What book retailers are thinking in pursuing this 'get out ahead of it' strategy utterly eludes me; it's like if Tower Records and HMV had busily installed kiosks in their foyers offering Napster downloads of all their wares. Prognosticators are saying the days of the printed book are similarly numbered.

If 2009 represents the death-throes of an industry, well, the end won't be pretty - because Nook or no Nook, publishers this year went to just the same exorbitant lengths to churn out mountains of crapola as they did when no electronic readers threatened their existence at all. Thousands of books crossed my path, many hundreds made their way to my nightstand (friends and basset hounds will attest: it's a big nightstand, and it's always stacked high with books), and here we are at the tail-end of the year to sort them all out. And as you could no doubt tell from our trusty elephant-crap photo up top, this particular entry will be devoted to the worst of those many hundreds of books. I'm expanding the list and dividing it into fiction and nonfiction, for your book-avoiding convenience. So let's get started!

Worst Fiction of 2009:


10. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer - Impossible to believe the fulsome, breathless praise this narcissistic piece of poop has garnered from virtually all corners of the critical world, although not impossible to understand: Dyer might not know how to write (Dyer certainly does not know how to write), but he knows how to nudge and wink and pass a bong, and book reviewers - being pallid, friendless sorts who grew up yearning to be cool - don't seem to have been able to resist the cool-ness Dyer is so relentlessly going for. Come Monday morning, when their collective crush has migrated to some other writer, perhaps they'll turn on Dyer en masse - seeing that would almost make suffering through the acclaim of this one worth enduring.


9. The Murder of King Tut by James Patterson and Martin Dugard - Despite the idiotic claims Patterson makes in his introduction to this tiny little book (which his legions of fans dutifully made a bestseller), it definitely belongs on a fiction list - it's wretched enough as fiction, but with its endless pages of invented hackneyed dialogue and stereotypical plot-twists, it would be reality-warpingly unthinkable as history. Ancient Egypt hasn't suffered an outrage this bad since Napoleon's troops tramped through its ruins.



8. The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell - This one stings a little extra because it genuinely tugged at my expectations: Littell can do good work, and the book is satisfyingly long and ambitious ... all of which made the disappointment even greater when it turned out to be a bloated, overblown brick of pointless Euro-nihilism that neither affirms anything nor interestingly condemns anything. Instead, grotesquerie after grotesquerie is served up in lavish detail to no point at all - which I'm sure Littell's defenders would say is the whole point, that war and atrocity are like that. And they should keep their condescension to themselves, the poor little darlings; I know perfectly well that war and atrocity are like that - but war and atrocity novels - good ones, anyway - are not, and Littell spending 3000 pages wallowing in narcissistic self-loathing certainly isn't.


7. Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem - Some of you will say that of course this book - one long hymn to getting high - would have to be on my list, since I'm no fan of the stink of that particular habit (or the evening-long stupidity it engenders). But that's not true - if Lethem had worked to make his prose enjoyable, I'd have liked it no matter what it was about (I liked Pynchon's Inherent Vice just fine this year, and it's easily as stoned a book at this one). But he doesn't, because he's plainly figured out he doesn't have to - his readers will move his book off shelves regardless of what he does.



6. Nobody Move by Denis Johnson - It's been a handy rule of mine almost from the first moment I started making rules about reading (I'll have to attempt a comprehensive list of them here some day!): nothing good can be expected from a book whose title is a cliche. And there's nothing good in Johnson's lazy little pamphlet of a pastiche - just flat, boring prose so inconsequential you feel extra sorry for all the earnest first-time novelists out there who'd love to have the money Johnson got (for both serial rights and novel rights, geez) for spitting up this drivel. Oh, but we'll be getting to first-time novelists, don't you worry!




5. Under the Dome by Stephen King - But first, a novelist who's been working so long you'd think at least some sort of craft would have penetrated the force-field of his mediocrity ... but you'd be wrong, and you'd waste a hell of a lot of reading time being wrong. King's new novel (written at the rate of roughly 10,000 words a day- in other words, not only without thinking but also without pausing in the physical act of typing - something, that is, that cannot possibly under any circumstances be good) about a small Maine town full of Stephen King fans suddenly cut off from the wider world is full of an irony so painful it has to be involuntary, and that irony is only darkened when a giant bucket of garbage like this gets an adulatory review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. End of Times indeed.


4. Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli - The writer-artist here has no more willing fan than I am, but this wretchedly stilted, unbearably pretentious mess of a graphic novel does literally nothing right. The artwork is too didactic to be dramatically involving; not only are we never given any reason to like the shallow, irritating main character but we're also never given any reason to keep turning the pages about him; the host of secondary characters are hauled on, talked down to, then shuttled offstage to no purpose at all, and the ending - well, again, I'm sure Mazzucchelli's defenders would say it's meant to be hipster-ironic, but that's just them being fey: it's actually just Mazzucchelli accidentally proving that he does his best stuff when he's got a writer handling the words.



3. The Collected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen - We mentioned earnest first-time novelists, and we did it sympathetically - but no sympathy extends to first novels written with either crass manipulation or frat boy bragging. Larsen's oh-so-precious tale of an adorably quirky little boy with a penchant for illustrating things is a perfect case of a book that considers it safer to trick readers into affectionate sympathy than to genuinely arouse that feeling in them, through work. And by all sales accounts, the trickery has been effective - it's entirely possible Larsen will have a standing reservation for the #3 spot here on the list. There is no writing lazier than gimmick-writing, and no more gimmicky book than this one has appeared on the scene in many, many years. I can only hope that somewhere down the line Larsen learns that "Hate reading books? Try Reif Larsen!" isn't, in fact, a recommendation.


2. How to Sell by Clancy Martin - This is where the frat boy bragging comes in. Martin's book looks on the surface like a standard roman a clef about a naive young guy who comes to the big city and learns the biz (doesn't matter what biz) while learning about life and love, blah, blah, blah. But underneath, this tone-deaf lump of clumsy prose cares about only one thing: making its young author lots of money (through a Hollywood sale, naturally, not boring old bookstores). This is a book entirely without a soul - I'm surprised register scanners could read its bar code.
Once again, most critics loved it because it gave them a vicarious burst of 'cool' - it was called a promising debut enough times so that we can legitimately fear the author believes it.


1. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, Zeitoun by Dave Eggers - Necessary to list these two abominations together, since they share the same things: rhapsodic critical reception, sludgy, colorless prose, a 100 percent total reliance on cliches (saintly minorities, for instance, in both cases), and opportunistic necrophilia. McCann's book ham-handedly uses the tragedy of September 11 to gin up his otherwise entirely forgettable tale of them brawlin' bardin' Irish immigrants, and the insufferable Eggers ham-handedly uses the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina to gin up his otherwise forgettable tale of a good little man confronting The System when all he wants to do is help people. It's not enough to say that neither book would be imaginable without the real-world disaster on which its plot hinges; it's painfully obvious from both these windy, self-adoring works that their authors consider plot-hinging the reason disasters happen in the first place. This is the worst kind of cultural vampirism, and after the praise heaped on Netherland last year, I'm starting to think our current crop of writers simply can't rise to the challenge of transmuting real-life turning points into challenging prose. Eggers has created his Grand Old Man status with his own money (and an unflagging conception of all writing as twee anachronism - a conception the literary world has embraced whole-heartedly without, apparently, seeing the loathsome irony), and McCann has recently had his Grand Old Man status conferred upon him, so they themselves can't help but see their praise as vindication of their grave-robbing. But the rest of us should maintain a proper outrage - novels have a higher calling than the sophomoric melodramas these two have produced.

Up Next: 2009's worst Nonfiction!

The Worst Books of 2008!

Hard to believe another entire year has passed since the last ‘Worst of’ list, but there’s our emblematic elephant-crap picture to prove it! That picture symbolizes not just what’s awful and redolently crappy, but the worst of what’s awful and redolently crappy – the books listed here.

As always, there was a great deal of garbage published this year, in every genre, in every month, in every format. I read a huge percentage of that garbage, and a huge percentage of what I read will find no place on this list, either because it wasn’t bad enough (several fiction debuts, for instance, and about 350 Lincoln books), or because it was so predictably bad that listing it would be redundant (it wasn’t a banner year for Star Trek fiction, for instance). No, these are the cream of the crap, the books that stand out in my memory even against the vast multitude of their crappy brethren:

10. The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria – an infuriating little piece of America-bashing that would be laughable if it hadn’t managed to find such a widespread audience (president-elect Obama is said to have read it, but I think he can be trusted to tell a bad book from a good one), Zakarian’s screed pats poor, ailing America on the head and tells her she’ll be OK, that life as just another post-empire Britain isn’t all that bad, that she’ll never be so fat or so ugly that the boys in the G8 won’t dance with her at least once (probably while that foxy Indonesia is in the ladies room). Zakarian obviously thinks his book raises all kinds of penetrating questions about America’s waning influence in a growing world, and in response to it, I had a few questions of my own, like: whose schools trained you? Whose institutions pay your living? Who published your book? Whose talk-shows host you? Who has the most nuclear launch-codes? And ultimately (asked with the proper Brooklyn accent), Aw, who needs you?

9. The World Is What It Is by Patrick French – This long-awaited authorized biography of the largely talentless Czechoslovakian author V. S. Naipaul (I know, I know – but you nearly exploded when you read that , didn’t you? Proving my point: without his endlessly trumpeted and synonymous nationality, this guy is virtually nothing) proves beyond a doubt that Naipaul is just as boring and loathsome to know as he is to read.

8. Too Fat to Fish by Artie Lange and Why We Suck by Dennis Leary – impossible not to list these two as one entry, since they’re basically the same book and equally disgusting. There’s a very specific picture of an American guy being painted in both these books: he’s brash, crude (refers to any affection expressed in any way between any two men as “homo shit”), and horny, and he absolutely under no circumstances thinks about anything. He’s a man’s man, knows what’s right, stands up, never backs down, walks the walk, shit like that. He smokes, he drinks, he makes fun of everything, and as a good friend of mine once said (with appropriate scorn), he’s never had a thought that somebody else didn’t have first. Actually caring about anything at all (other than beer, pizza, and The Game) is the worst possible sin in this guy’s world. These two books exult in exactly the kind of brainless-goombah version of the Ugly American that was decisively rejected in the last presidential election and that will no longer be represented in the Oval Office, which brings us to:

7. American Lion by Jon Meacham – The stunning sales success of this book about America’s second-worst president (I know all of you young people out there are nodding, thinking I’m reserving the bottom spot for the worst president of your lifetime, George W. Bush, but sorry: nobody is ever likely to be worse than Richard Nixon) is troubling, to say the least. As I’ve had to point out to more than one potential buyer of Meacham’s credulous, execrable book, Andrew Jackson was a liar, a braggart, an inept military leader, a moron, a hopelessly out-of-his-depth president, and a thoroughly bad person – none of which you’ll learn from this brazenly mendacious campaign biography. Jackson was all of those things and one more: a fraud – it’s not possible to be an exponent of ‘popular democracy’ if you personally own human slaves. Like I said, the country has decisively rejected this kind of destructive, moronic prank-puller as a fit occupant for the White House. Meacham should be ashamed of himself, and so should all the hundreds of thousands of Americans buying his book.

6. Netherland by Joseph O’Neill – Yeesh talk about commercial success! This wretched, boggy misfire of a novel has been wildly popular in 2008, despite the fact that it’s just about the crassest, most cynical, laziest botch-job of an alleged 9-11 novel imaginable (although Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close comes incredibly close). That O’Neill couldn’t exercise sufficient self-control to turn his cricket-research into the Esquire essay it should have been is bad enough; that he grafted onto that research one of the worst tragedies in American history is pretty much the ultimate addition of insult to injury.

5. The Rose Labyrinth by Titania Hardie – I don’t know what’s worse, the porn star name of the author or the tortured, pointless meanderings of the book; oh wait, yes I do – the book is worse, because unlike the name, it holds out not even the illusion of enjoyment. The historical fiction segments of this morosely awful novel read like dislodged Wikipedia fragments with bad dialogue pasted on, and the present-day segments (the book plays the one against the other, of course, because as we all know, the past only existed to give focus-depth to the maguffin-chasing antics of the present) are unendurably wooden – a description that brings us back to Titania Hardie, and so prompts us to move on to:

4. 2666 by Roberto Bolano – The specter of one’s imminent demise, a wise man once said, wonderfully concentrates the mind. Alas, it doesn’t do squat for the creative powers. This enormous, multi-tentacled monstrosity by the late Bolano is a heartbreaking picture of a dying writer’s urge to get out on paper all the various ideas, fantasies, and fixations that still remain inside him, but since that’s only half the job of being a writer (and since Bolano died before he could do the shaping and pruning that is the other half), the end result is about as satisfying as if Evelyn Waugh had published the disjointed, half-coherent final ravings of the dying Lord Marchmain as a book in their own right. Since nobody likes to speak ill of the dead, and since book critics are generally craven in the face of very long books, this thing has had a holiday among the reviewers (Sam Sacks at Open Letters being, once again, a godsend of an exception) – and so a lot of people have bought a bookshelf-curio they’ll never actually finish. Lucky them.

3. Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman – Who exactly decided that this garrulous idiot was a writer? Who, after reading his stoned, paint-by-numbers hackwork in the various magazines thought his attempts at writing fiction would be worth razing a forest to print? Gawd only knows what Downtown Owl is about – Klosterman seems to be trying to write about his parents’ generation, back in, you know, olden times, but the scene-setting only lasts as many sentences as Klosterman feels like writing at any given time (and as for revising? Pshhhhhh-yah! Not!), and the dialogue is from a pretty bad movie of those olden times, and what’s the point of all of it anyway? What could this loser possibly write that wouldn’t make “Have you read the latest Klosterman?” the grim, dutiful setup to a punch line?

2. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell – The author of The Tipping Point (i.e. Follow Blindly) and Blink (i.e. Don’t Think) has dashed off a new sure-fire bestseller, Outliers (i.e. It’s Not Your Fault), and it’s every bit as anile and preposterous as the previous two. This time around, Gladwell’s … well, ‘theory’ is clearly overstating things … his madcap idea is that cultural differences account for much more of what makes outstanding thinkers and leaders (in the Gladwell universe – and especially in the minds of the Gladwell target audience – those two things are always the same) than individual capacity or effort. The ‘outliers’ of the title are those few, isolated, industrious little brown people who abandon their kooky aboriginal cultures and come to enlightenment (i.e. Target) from odd, invigorating angles. And we can all be outliers! All we need to do is mimic some of that outsider flair! Just don’t forget to pay them their social security while they’re cleaning your pool and you’re mimicking them – you can get into such trouble if you don’t!

1. Churchill, Hitler, and the ‘Unnecessary War’ by Pat Buchanan – That Buchanan is a pig-eyed, pea-brained, arch-conservative, close-the-borders, two-guns-in-every-garage nutjob is well-known, but before this disastrous, poorly-written, ineptly-researched single worst book of 2008, it was possible to believe he wasn’t actually insane. The ‘Unnecessary War’ removes all doubt. His overriding animus is of course bigotry, in this case thinly disguised as ‘real-world politics’: that America should have steered clear of the foreign entanglements of World War Two, that Hitler was at heart just a misunderstood German statesman trying to find a modus vivendi with the irrationally touchy great powers of Europe, that the fight erupting between them was a local matter that shouldn’t have embroiled the United States. Buchanan’s book sank into richly-deserved obscurity almost instantly after publication, but Buchanan himself deserves a different fate: he should be hooked up to a saline drip and monitored by a hospital triage staff, so he stays alive as each living Allied serviceman and woman, the descendants of each dead Allied serviceman and woman, each living Holocaust survivor, and the descendants of each dead Holocaust victim takes a turn giving him one solid punch in his fat, smug face. When all of them are done, every living actual historian should also get a shot. Whatever’s left of Buchanan should then be patched up and deposited in the nearest courtroom to be pauperized by the world’s biggest libel action.

And there you have it – the worst of the worst of 2008! Luckily for all of us, the clowns don’t yet run the circus, so next time, we’ll talk about the good stuff, the best of the year!

The Worst Books of 2007!

The year 2007 rushes headlong to its end, and we here at Stevereads are borne along. Every day brings more and more year-end tasks to be undertaken, and although this is seemly, it detracts from our great enterprise here, that is, talking about books.

In part, those two forces combine at this time of year, since it's a natural occasion to look back on letters and assess what happened, good and bad.

This is our patch, after all, books. Their active prosecution, mind you, not their passive reception. We leave bad movies to hilarious, acerbic Brian, and we leave the wrangling of current comics to our sprightily sane comrade Gianni (and his increasingly boisterous comments-field). Our Lady Disdain can handle the pop-culture edge in her own inimitable way. But our own bailiwick is not politics (although if it were, we would point out that the addition of Oprah Winfrey to the presidential campaign narrows the outcome of that campaign down to one name) nor music nor the intricacies of 'Lost' - our concern here is books, and at the end of the year we naturally reflect on the best and the worst of what the last twelve months had to offer. Reflect, and adjudicate, as is our sacred duty.

So here, without further ado, are the worst books of 2007, a year in which that's truly saying something, since virtually every major author in the world chose 2007 to squat, grunt, and then crap all over the literary landscape. In other words, if you managed to write a book worse than, say, Exit Ghost you had to be trying mighty hard - and each of these worthies pulled it off.

10. Microtrends by Mark Penn - an idiotic book by Senator Hillary Clinton's chief synergy-wonk, purporting to spot tiny but vital currents in American society. The book is pure bunkum, and it's worrisome to think of the people who are out there buying it hook, line, and sinker.

9. Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche - Marche's main conceit - that his book purports to be a survey of the literature of a fictitious place - does double duty as being both enormously egotistical and hugely condescending. Pastiche is a lowly enough incarnation of literature as it is - pastiche that thinks it's trenchant is not only hilariously overreaching but inherently mean-spirited. The inhabitants of Sanjania ought to sue.

8. The Perils of Peace by Thomas Fleming - the setting of the piece, the extremely touch-and-go period in early American history when colonial arms had won victory but colonial statesmen were a long way off from winning viability among the nations of the world, would seem to be foolproof for the historian; only Fleming could have made it boring. But make it boring he does, ladling out one credulous, sententious glop of uneven, largely unresearched prose after another until the hapless reader is willing to give the whole bloody mess back to the British.

7. The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs - Book-marketing gimmicks have been shameless and, shall we say, soulless since time immemorial (the Roman poet Horace once acquired a new publisher who advertised his latest work as being posthumous, much to the poet's dismay - until he got the payments, after which he didn't mind so much), but seldom has a gimmick been so offensive as this; Jacobs (whose willingness to do things he ought not in pursuit of royalty checks makes him a kind of living gimmick) decides to apply the Bible's multiple teachings literally to his Upper West Side life. The result is a book blasphemous even to atheists.

6. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid - the first truly horrible work made possible by the events of September 11, this arch, wretched, over-mannered, almost unbelievably condescending little book is told in the first person by a character who's killed on the last page, if that gives you any hint of its technical incompetence. But this is the least of its shortcomings; the dialogue is arch, the people are cardboard CNN bullet-headlines, and the incredibly complicated tangles of Islamic fundamentalism - tangles that currently ensnare the world - are reduced to mere posturings. This book should have been supremely important and overwhelmingly moving, given our times. Instead, it stands only as the way not to go about things.

5. Tree of Smoke by Dennis Johnson - a fine and capable short story writer goes disasterously awry in this, the very worst Vietnam novel ever written. Every shopworn vanity of Freshman Comp. is on display here; endless baggy disgressions are treated like Sophoclean profundities, characters are allegorized to no point or purpose, and dialogue is all pointed, empty pomp. What could have been a great book in other hands is here the misfire of the year.

4. I am a Strange Loop by Richard Hofstadter - alledged to be a meditation on the nature of human consciousness, this mess of a book (by the author of Godel, Escher, Bach) lurches between preening self-importance and ridiculous species-blindness. The great roving sea-turtles of this beautiful planet, the ground-shivering elephants of the African plain, the blue-black ravens who gossip in churhyards, the leaping, jumping wolves of the arctic circle, the shape-shifting brainy cephalopods of the world's oceans - all these beings and half a dozen more alive on Earth today would, if they could bother to read this silly book, say in unison, 'um, human? Aren't you forgetting all of us?'

3. A Free Life by Ha Jin - A searching generational saga that ... blah, blah, blah. How long has it been that Jin's been a blah, blah, blah author? This bloated, sophomoric book has no beginning, no middle, no end, and no point - it's only reason for being is the collection of human details that go into making Ha Jin the human being he is, and really, isn't 2007 late enough in the epoch to declare that insufficient grounds for talking about a book, or better yet from publishing it? Are we all really duty-bound to admire, say, Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation, a work of no merit whatsoever, simply because its author might have carried a rifle as a child? And likewise are we to accord to a piece of crap like A Free Life some kind of literary regard simply because Jin's name isn't Fergusson? It's infuriating, that such a disposable work should be granted even a season's respect simply because none dare call it autobiography.

2. Never Give Up by Teddy Bruschi - inspirational, feel-good sports memoirs are generally innocuous things, bromides for a season, full of patent reassurances as to the value of courage, pluck, and never giving up. Bruschi - he of that world's marvel, the New England Patriots - has enjoined ghostwriters to produce a similar book, but its occasion is far deadlier: Bruschi suffered a stroke a year ago and, once recovered, caused this ill-advised book to come to be, full of bromides about seizing your dreams and whatnot. The wrong here is that Bruschi, after suffering a potentially life-ending medical irruption, voluntarily returned to the pursuit of a sport in which he's routinely exposed to the most violent physical collisions on the planet. The NFL's money managed to buy doctors to approve this course, but they were villains, perverted utterly from the Oath they took when they began their careers. Strokes from which men fully recover are meant to be warnings, warnings to amend ways of living. For ordinary mortals, this would take the form of eating better and getting more exercise. For young men like Teddy Bruschi, this takes the form of retiring from a career that consists of fanatically exaggerated physical exertion and gigantically violent physical collisions. Bruschi's refusal to do this merits his book a place on our list.

1. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris - it's difficult to know where to start with this, the worst book of 2007. It's ostensibly a workplace comedy, but it would be a gross injustice to such smart little masterpieces as Randall Jarrett's Pictures from an Institution to call it so. Everything about this book - 'book' is the best we can do, since it's neither novel nor memoir but rather, as is pictured on the dustjacket, an endless stream of post-it notes - is repulsive, from its hipster disdain for any of storytelling's traditional payoffs (plot, conclusion, even narrative coherence) to its craven embracing of its own modest successes (best symbolized by the cigarette perched above our hot young author's ear in his author photo - a cigarette which has been airbrushed out of existence in all subsequent editions, just as Ferris' too-cool-for-school insouciance has vanished with the onset of hefty publisher's checks) to its relentlessly obnoxious tone. You know that young guy you work with? The one who's never happy with anything work-related, the one who's so thoroughly practiced in running down everything that even something clearly and purely to his benefit meets with nothing but his scorn, the one who's mildly funny but whose humor grates pretty quickly, since it's so ultimately defeating? Ferris is that young man, and his incredibly tiresome book is nothing more than a long collection of workplace-griper stories - the craziness of 'lifers,' the craziness of bosses, the craziness of rules ... basically the craziness of everybody who isn't willing to pay Ferris $150,000 a year just to show up - deriding such crazinesses is all this book tries - and fails - to do. That this kid will hereafter have a paid literary career is the singular crime of 2007's world of letters.

And there you have it! 2007's chief rogues gallery! But fear not - the best is yet to come! Up next: the best of 2007, to round out our year together.